Understaffed, overworked, and stressed out, "small business" doesn't mean "less work". On the contrary, SMB employees are often expected to embrace the role of two or three people to keep their company in the game.

As the world moves faster, small businesses are keeping up with the big dogs by bringing a new player onto their teams: a cloud project management tool.

Here are 3 ways a cloud project management tool like Wrike will help your small business step up its game:

1. Better Management: It tracks work responsibilities so you don't have to.

"I thought you were going to do that?"

"No, you said YOU were going to do that!"

Accessible communication is usually not a problem when you have a small team. What is a problem is remembering what's been said and decided. When a task accidentally slips through the cracks, meetings can quickly devolve into arguments and finger pointing between stressed and overloaded teammates.

Creating and assigning every task in a project management tool means that everyone knows who's responsible for work. If you forget who's working on what, or you need a progress update, the tool points you in the right direction.

Meetings stay productive, and no one can deflect responsibility when the tool shows the truth.

Best practice tip: Keep your project management tool open during your meetings to assign or reassign tasks as you discuss them.

2. Better Productivity: It helps you escape the inbox black hole.

Ever open up your inbox to reference a conversation, sigh in frustration ("10 new unread emails? Really?"), and spend the next hour sorting through the noise? Or suffer the painful task of looking for an email attachment you swear someone sent to you, if only you could find it?

Project management tools like Wrike keep important discussions right next to their relevant tasks, instead of getting lost in "she forgot to reply-all" email threads. Same with attachments — they're glued to the tasks they belong with.

The right project management tool makes it easy to immediately find the information you need to keep work going.

No unnecessary and distracting dives into the inbox.

3. Increased Agility: It gives you back hours in your day.

Overcoming size limitations one of the toughest challenges that small businesses face. "We're small. We're understaffed. We have lots of great ideas, but we lack the time and manpower to get them done." Your team wants to work faster so you can get more done, but it's hard without the right tools in place.

Adopting a project management tool adds hours to your week. It eliminates the time wasted when employees have to check in to ask, "What's next? Who's next? I forget, now what?" If you load all upcoming tasks into a project management system, you and your colleagues can switch from one priority to the next without unnecessary downtime. Work moves faster and your team will be more efficient so they can finally get to that "when we have time" assignment. It's like bringing on another pair of hands.

Cloud project management software is changing the way the business game is played. Wrike is helping stressed and overworked SMBs stay on top of every project and actually get work done faster for better business results.